Many commercially available snack food items include seasonings or other toppings of one form or another deposited upon their surfaces. Examples of such snack foods include potato chips, which can be seasoned with salt, barbecue flavoring, sour cream and onion flavoring, cheese-based toppings, etc. Corn chips and other snack food items, such as pretzels, corn puffs and popcorn, can be similarly seasoned. In addition to the savory snack food items just described, sweet snacks commonly are topped with powdered and granular sugars, decorative toppings, and the like.
Toppings can be applied to snack food items in a variety of ways, for example the topping may be dispensed onto snack food items, which are tumbling in a rotating drum. The tumbling action of the snack food items aids in the even distribution of the topping over the entire contents of the drum.
Commonly used savory snack food seasonings and toppings exhibit a variety of physical properties, which govern their behavior during the dispensing operation. Flour salt, the finely powdered salt used as a topping for potato chips, is extremely dry and free flowing. Thus, this topping tends to rapidly pass through dispensing equipment, and its flow must be carefully metered and regulated to avoid over-salting the snack food product. Sour cream and onion toppings (as well as cheese-based, dairy-based, and oil-based toppings in general) are relatively moist and tend to resist free flow through dispensing equipment. These relatively “clumpy” or “sticky” toppings tend to clog dispensing apparatus and are prone to intermittent, uneven flow.
Thus, one important attribute of a topping dispensing equipment is the ability to dispense, in a controlled, evenly regulated manner, both free-flowing and sticky toppings. The even distribution of seasoning and toppings is important to many aspects of the snack food production process. First, even distribution is essential to providing a uniform appearing and tasting product. Further, uneven or wasteful topping dispensing can adversely impact the economy of the manufacturing process. Finally, over-topped and under-topped items may need to be discarded to avoid inconsistencies in the final, packaged product.